I have noticed in my past and current ventures and underwhelming at the market place. Why are my products and services not adopted? This is a difficult question to answer some options include:

  • Am I out of touch with the market place?
  • Is my marketing budget too small?
  • Am I not patient enough?

I could be out of touch, my head could be so far in the clouds about some of my ideas that I can't see straight. It could also be that everyone I talk to about these things are just being nice and don't tell you what they will do. It could also be that I have just not talked to enough people. So how do I get more people to look and give me feedback? Marketing dollars are one solution and time is another, both of which I have neither of.

In this process of launching AppGin.Com, I have discovered an interesting funnel via Google Adwords, say you get a 1,000,000 impressions.

  • Funnel #1) Getting people to click on your ad. About 1%, or 10,000 clicks. (how much per click?)
  • Funnel #2) Getting people to register or sign-up. About 5-10%, or about 1,000 registrants.
  • Funnel #3) Getting people to use your application/software. Unknown maybe 5%, or about 50 users.
  • Funnel #4) Getting people to move from the “Free Version” to the “Paid Version”. Unknown maybe 5%, or about 2.5 sales.

So purely from a market research perspective, just going after the average Joe via Google Adwords this yields about 2.5 sales in 1,000,000 impressions. If you spend about $1.00 a click, that's about $10,000 for 2.5 $25 dollar sales, which from a business perspective is horrible.

So before you write any code, before you spend anytime on designing an architecture for your really cool new idea, try this:

  1. Get a cool idea.
  2. Get a few nice pictures and logos (pay to have someone create a cool logo for you).
  3. Create a registration form asking people if they would be interested in being a beta customer.
  4. Start a Google Adwords campaign, spend $200.
  5. If you don't get 10 registrants, think of something else.
  6. If you get 10 registrants, email them asking them about what they are looking for in this product or service, and what they would pay for it.
  7. If you don't get at least 1 person responding back, think of something else.